Bestiary

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Although Reggle Stlll had the envelope that that other security guard, the one who’d shown up with Stan Sadowski, had given him, he’d already spent the fifty bucks. Sadowski had once handed him a Free Drink coupon for a place called the Blue Bayou, and after the free drink Reggie had used the money for a lap dance.

As for the envelope, he’d been waiting for the right opportunity to give it to Mr. al-Kalli himself — he’d read in a book on personal improvement that if you wanted to get ahead, you needed to make sure that you got on the boss’s radar — but he just hadn’t found it. Once the car had sped out so fast he could barely get the gate up in time, and the last few times al-Kalli must have come in and out by the back gate, over near the riding ring.

But tonight looked like it was going to be his night — the headlights of the Mercedes limo were approaching fast, up the hill, and Reggie dug the envelope out of his pocket. A couple of times he’d debated steaming it open and seeing what was inside, but he was afraid that al-Kalli would be able to figure out what he’d done. And from everything he’d heard, al-Kalli was one dude you didn’t want to mess with. Just those frickin’ peacocks alone, with their screeching and squawking, was enough to give him the willies at night.

As the car pulled up, Reggie stepped out of the gatehouse and raised a hand at Jakob, the driver. The tinted window rolled smoothly down, and Reggie said, “I have something for Mr. al-Kalli.”

Always deal with the boss himself, never a middleman — that’s what the advice book had said.

“Give it to me,” Jakob said, holding his hand palm out.

Reggie tried to look into the back of the limo, but it was so dark in there he couldn’t see a damn thing.

“My instructions were to—”

Jakob opened the door and Reggie had to step back just to get out of the way.

“Give it to me, whatever it is. Now.”

Jakob towered over him, his eyes as black as his shirt.

Reggie handed it over, and Jakob turned it back and forth in his hand. “Who brought this?”

“One of the Silver Bear Security guys.”

“When?”

“Um, I don’t know exactly when.” He didn’t want to admit that he hadn’t found a way to give it to al-Kalli immediately. “Maybe a day or so ago.”

“And it took you till now to hand it over?”

Reggie wasn’t sure what to say. What would that self-improvement book tell him to do?

Jakob got back in the car, and as the gates swung open, he said through the still open window, “What time do you get off tonight?”

“Six A.M.”

“Don’t come back tomorrow.”

The car took off, and Reggie stood there, flat-footed, so long the gates nearly hit him when they closed again.

At the house, al-Kalli waited patiently in the kitchen while Jakob held the envelope up to the light, sniffed it for plastique, shook it gently for anthrax powder or any other substance. There was no return address, but that was to be expected. Jakob let some water collect in the kitchen sink, then opened the envelope just above it, ready to drop it and hit the disposal button in a second.

“It’s probably nothing,” al-Kalli said, impatiently.

Jakob thought he was probably right, and he carefully opened the envelope at one end, then drew out the single, typed page inside. He saw the salutation — a simple Mr. al-Kalli—and several brief paragraphs below it. There was a scrawled signature at the bottom, and below it the words Capt. Derek Greer. He made a small “huh.”

“What is it?” al-Kalli said, taking the letter Jakob was now extending to him.

“It’s from the one you hired, the American soldier, in Iraq.”

Al-Kalli took a pair of gold reading glasses from the breast pocket of his suit coat and put them on. “He knows I’m here?” al-Kalli said, as he began to read.

Jakob didn’t reply, but simply waited. Still, just watching al-Kalli’s face told him most of what he needed to know.

In less than a minute, al-Kalli had put his glasses back in his pocket, folded up the letter again, and said, “We may have a small problem.”

Jakob knew that when Mohammed said small, he meant large.

“What would you like me to do?”

Al-Kalli looked thoughtful. “We must first have a word with Rashid.”

A few minutes later, they found him where he always was — in the bestiary.

But al-Kalli, already in a black mood, only grew blacker as the doors whooshed shut behind him.

The odor in the air was unhealthy, the cries of the animals strained and plaintive. Rashid himself, in a soiled lab coat, was playing a hose over the mottled hide of the basilisk. When he saw his employer, he quickly shut off the water and came forward, drying his hands on the tails of his coat.

“Mr. al-Kalli,” he said, but before he could say another word, al-Kalli had backhanded him, hard, across the mouth. His sapphire ring cracked against a tooth.

Rashid fell against the bars of a cage, and the creature within suddenly sprang upward, spittle flying in all directions.

Al-Kalli grabbed the spindly Rashid by the collar of his coat and dragged him clear. Rashid, in terror, simply slumped to the ground.

“Who have you been talking to?” al-Kalli hissed, and Rashid’s eyes went wide.

“No one,” he sputtered; there was blood smeared like lipstick across his mouth.

Al-Kalli drew back his hand and smacked him again, so hard Rashid’s head spun on his neck.

“Someone knows about the animals.”

“I have never… told anyone.”

“Someone has seen the animals.”

Now Jakob knew how serious the problem had become.

“Who have you let in here?”

“No one… only Bashir. To clean.”

Bashir was a teenage boy, one step above an idiot, whom Rashid had brought from the bombed-out ruins of Mosul. He barely spoke, lived in a shed behind the bestiary, and was a virtual slave.

“Who besides Bashir?”

Rashid simply shook his head, in terror and denial. “No one ever comes here… unless it is to…” He didn’t know how to complete that sentence, nor did he want to. The only other people who came here were prisoners, men al-Kalli planned to feed to the beasts. Was he about to become one of them? Rashid thought. Words of the Koran began to tumble like a fast-moving stream through his head.

Al-Kalli threw him away, like something soiled, and Rashid sprawled on the dirt floor of the bestiary. He knew enough not to get up; it was better to lie prostrate, submissive, defeated; it was true among the animals, and it was true among men.

Al-Kalli’s gaze, filled with contempt and disgust, moved away from him. The scent of blood in the air, however slight, had agitated the animals. There were grunts and snarls, and overhead the furious beating of wings. As al-Kalli watched, his prized phoenix dropped off its lofty perch and swooped in a blaze of red and gold into the air, screeching like a whole flock of eagles. It flew madly from one end of the vast facility to the other, the tips of its glistening wings grazing the steel walls, its claws extended and flexing as if anxious to capture some living prey.

The other animals, watching its flight and perhaps envying the bird’s relative freedom, let loose with a louder volley of howls and yelps and growls. There was a dense, musky smell in the air, and even Jakob instinctively loosened his jacket enough to make drawing his gun easier.

What was he to do? al-Kalli wondered, as the cries rose around him. His beasts were dying — the legacy of his family, for thousands of years, was about to vanish under his care. Under difficult circumstances, he had saved as many as he could, as many as he thought necessary to breed and sustain the species. But he was failing. Rashid was a fool, and, despite all his training, no more capable of caring for such exquisite treasures than the idiot boy, Bashir. These were creatures from a time before time, beasts that had walked among the dinosaurs, that had grazed the fields of Eden. It would be a risk — it would always be a risk — to share the knowledge of them with anyone.

But what was needed, al-Kalli saw more clearly now than ever before, was someone who knew that world. Someone who understood creatures of such great antiquity — someone who revered them as he did — and who might intuit what they needed to survive.

And if such a man existed, al-Kalli knew who it might be.